ACCORDING TO THE DEMOCRATS, Bill Clinton is guilty of nothing more than having an
extramarital affair. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked whether we wanted to have
"prosecutors with unlimited powers, accountable to no one, who will spend millions of
dollars investigating a person's personal life, who then haul before grand juries every
person of the opposite sex the person has had contact with ... "

The Republicans, on the other hand, insist that the president's misconduct has nothing
whatever to do with sex but with perjury, obstruction of justice and subornation of
perjury. Appearing on "Meet the Press" last week, Judiciary Committee Chairman
Henry Hyde, R-Ill., having been reminded of his own extramarital affair 30 years ago,
insisted that the sex was not the issue.

Republicans -- even those who have committed sexual sins -- should stop saying that.
Of course, the sex is part of the problem -- and not just because it led to the perjury,
obstruction and other crimes. To call the president's conduct with Monica Lewinsky "an
extramarital affair" is really to grant it a dignity it doesn't merit.

The president's defenders have hit the "affair" theme hard, insisting that no historical
figure could withstand a searching inquiry into his private life. Why, Franklin Roosevelt
and Dwight Eisenhower had affairs, they say, and we would not have wanted them
impeached!

Well, in the first place, it is by no means clear that Eisenhower ever had an affair with
Kay Summersby. Historian Gil Troy, author of "Affairs of State," has written that Ike,
while separated from Mamie (and, by the way, saving Western civilization by winning
World War II) was clearly fond of his young, vivacious driver. But there is no evidence
that a sexual affair ever took place. For Clinton's mouthpieces to assert it as fact is
contemptible.

Those of low character always seek to defame the virtuous in order to make
comparisons with themselves less painful. Such assertions go down smoothly with a
nation that has lately been instructed, also without evidence, that Thomas Jefferson
used a 13-year-old black slave as a concubine and that Christopher Columbus was a
genocidal agent of European colonialism.

Roosevelt had an extramarital relationship early in his marriage, while he was serving
as assistant secretary of the Navy. He ended the relationship with Lucy Mercer (later
Rutherford) at the insistence of his wife and mother. As it turned out, she was with him
when he died, in Warm Springs, Ga. -- as was his daughter Anna -- a fact that caused
Eleanor Roosevelt great pain in her widowhood.

The Roosevelt/Mercer relationship lasted for decades, was between two adults close
in age and appears to have been a love affair. That does not justify it morally, but it
places it on a plane quite different from the Lewinsky indulgence.

For all that the president's men now cry "private matter" about his conduct, there was
very little that was private about the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky. Instead, the
thing smacked of exhibitionism. They chose to conduct their trysts in or near one of the
most public rooms in the world. And they kept the door ajar. Clinton told Lewinsky that
this was to allay suspicion. But was it also an invitation to disclosure? Kathleen Willey
told the world that when Clinton grabbed her and she protested, "Aren't you worried
that someone will come in?" he shrugged it off.

These are not the actions of a lover, even an illicit lover. This is the conduct of a
profoundly juvenile man giddy at his power and utterly deaf to notions of propriety,
honor or decency.

He used Lewinsky as a sex toy, unzipping his fly and gesturing for her to service him
while he chatted on the telephone -- even, on one occasion, while discussing deploying
U.S. troops to Bosnia with a congressman. Surely not even in the '90s can that be
called an "affair." The sex, standing alone, was an abuse of office.

We don't elect presidents to act as moral exemplars. But we cannot tolerate utter louts
either. Clinton's conduct is illustrative of the moral rot that has already done severe
damage to the nation. Failing to punish him will only accelerate the
decline.

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